Russia's 'Silicon Valley' dumps a million bucks into US cloud biz

Russian government-backed technology fund the Skolkovo Foundation has pumped $1m into a private American cloud company - Jelastic - which means the Palo Alto start-up will open a secondary office in Russia's Silicon Valley – Skolkovo Innovation Park in the Moscow suburb of Skolkovo.

Jelastic is an easy-to-use cloud platform for Java applications - it runs any Java app and requires no code-changing or API fiddling to make the applications compatible.

The company scooped the $1m investment yesterday, the Skolkovo Foundation site announced, and it will use the money to make a super-secure version of its Java-hosting products that will be safe for governments to use.

Jelastic plans to funnel the money into making a working prototype of the Jelastic Private Cloud (JPC), a cloud platform for Java applications that will have extra security features making it safe for governments and corporations to run in-house Java apps on.

The Californian firm's founders – Ruslan Synytskyy, Constantin Alexandrov and Alexey Skutin – will be setting up an office in the high-tech Skolkovo Innovation Park. Firms based in Russia's Silicon Valley get special tax breaks from the Russian government.

The Skolkovo Foundation, which is the investment arm of the Skolkovo Innovation Park and is primarily funded by the government, has invested in over 500 companies since being set up in 2009. ®